misogyny

“Walking While Female”: What’s The Matter With Men, Anyway?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I just finished reading some of the posts on a Washington, D.C. site called Collective Action for Safe Spaces, and found myself simultaneously amazed, shocked, repulsed and depressed. Based on the posts from female victims of random acts in broad daylight raging from harassment to sexual assault, the unethical male treatment of women like prime grade beef on the hoof is far, far more common than I assumed, and raises a genuine question about what kind of values our culture teaches its men.

What would ever lead a man to decide that it was acceptable to pinch a woman’s derriere in a crowd? Or a cyclist to shove his hand up a woman’s skirt as he zipped by? Or a photographer to aim his zoom lens camera at multiple women’s busts in public? Apparently this conduct is so commonplace that many, even most, women don’t bother to report it, reasoning that the police have better things to do.

You know what? They don’t. Either the police have to enforce a woman’s right to enjoy life and appear in public without being sexually molested, or we need to pass laws the allow  anti-harassment enforcement by women and the men, if there are any, who possess a sense of decency and are willing to act decisively to stop the predators—and by that I mean breaking their faces. I cannot imagine anything more important than maintaining the cultural standard that harassing women, touching them without permission and making unwanted and unasked for sexual remarks to them is not merely rude and boorish, but a violation of basic human rights.

If this nation is really raising a bumper crop of men who think otherwise, and we seem to be, it is time for women and men alike to be vigorously non-partisan in rejecting and shunning writers, public figures, entertainers and next door neighbors who make it obvious in their speech and conduct that they believe women exist on earth for their denigration and pleasure. To pick the obvious example, Bill Maher has repeatedly referred to women on his HBO show “Real Time” as cunts, twats, bitches, and other misogynist terms. What message does is send that he keeps getting nominated for a Emmy? Why have Dan Rather, Charles M. Blow, Paul Begala, Andrew Sullivan, Catherine Crier, Michael Steele, and Eliot Spitzer—wait, scratch Eliot; I know the answer in his case—-appeared on Maher’s show, licked his boots, and endorsed his sick frat boy attitudes toward women and giving spiritual nourishment to our rising young rapists?

We have no ethical standards unless we are willing to stand up for them, enforce them, and refuse to tolerate anything less. It is dangerous to “walk while female” because both men and women do tolerate such despicable, primitive, joy obliterating conduct.

_____________________________________________

Facts: Collective Action

Source:Washington Post

Graphic: Parterre

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Ethics Hero: Ashley Judd

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Actress Ashley Judd (Full Disclosure: I am a long-time fan) finally has had it with snarky and degrading public speculation about her face, her weight, her appearance, and whether the star of TV’s “Missing” has “had work done,” and properly slams the celebrity media and those journalists who either write about her like she’s a competitor in a dog show or question her conduct and character based on their assessment of what she “should” look like.  Her verdict: it’s misogyny. The acting member of the Judd family has written a passionate, perceptive, articulate (if you forgive occasional lapses into feminist jargon, like objectification otheration, and (yuck)  heteronormative) and courageous essay over at the Daily Beast. If you have a daughter, have her read it. If you have a son, have him read it too. Heck, everybody should read it….here.

I wonder if the Daily Beast editors read it.  Here is Ashley Judd, eloquently pleading that women should be assessed base on how they do their job rather than on their perceived sex appeal, and where does the website post it?

On the page called “The Sexy Beast.”

You have a lot of work to do, Ashley, but you’re fighting the right fight.

Brava.

The Process Can Be Ugly, And Sure Was This Time, But This Is How Cultural Ethics Standards Change

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Greta was the tipping point.

The Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke Ethics Train Wreck is over at last, but unlike with many such debacles, something positive occurred. I believe that an emphatic cultural standard was established that calling a woman—any woman, famous or not, liberal or conservative—a derogatory term designed purely to denigrate her by denigrating her gender will not be considered acceptable in political, quasi-political or arguably-political commentary henceforward. If such rhetoric occurs in a comic or entertainment context, no politician or elected official can appear to endorse the individual who utters the offensive words.

I’m not arguing right now whether this is a good or a bad development, but merely that it happened, and that it is a real change. For this to happen, a conservative radio talk show host had to use the terms “slut’ and “prostitute” to make the botched satirical point that a feminist law student activist who argued that free contraceptives were a woman’s right was the equivalent of women who wanted to be “paid for sex.” If pundits and bloggers had merely declared this statement uncivil and cruel, nothing more would have happened, and the incident would have been quickly forgotten. But sensing political points to be scored in an election year, and with the added incentive of being handed what was seen as powerful ammunition to attempt a frontal attack against a detested partisan critic, Democrats,  progressives, feminists, activists, Obama strategists and left-biased journalists decided to cast the Limbaugh’s poor judgment in extreme terms. Continue reading →

Is Obama Ethically Obligated To Reject Bill Maher’s Million? Don’t Be Ridiculous!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Classy, Bill...but don't worry, your money's still good, even if you aren't.

Confirming the Ethics Train Wreck status of the church-run institutions/health care/ religious freedom/contraceptives coverage/Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke mess, the Weekly Standard and other conservative pundits are playing the hypocrisy card and arguing that if Limbaugh is so reprehensible, then the Obama super-pac should apply the same standards to serial misogynist Bill Maher and return his recent $1 million contribution.

Idiots. As long as campaign contributions aren’t the fruits of a crime, the whole concept of rejecting “dirty money” is silly beyond belief. Do Republicans really want to stand for the proposition that only contributions from the pure of heart and word can be accepted by those running for office? Jerks like Bill Maher have rights too; he should have the same opportunity to support political candidates of his choice no matter what offensive and crude things he says to his cheering lap dog audiences on HBO. Politicians are not accountable for the character, words, beliefs and misdeeds of his supporters, nor should they be. This is not a standard that Republicans, of all people, want to establish. Nor should any of us.

Absolutely: Democrats and feminists who are furious at Limbaugh’s despicable misogyny  show themselves as hypocrites by appearing on Maher’s show. But his money is as good as anybody’s, and he has not forfeited his right to support candidates of his choosing. Nobody should be trying to take that away from him.

Ethics Dunce: Rep. Debby Wasserman-Schultz

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Honestly, if you had told me that the Democrats could find someone to chair their national organization who was as big a buffoon, hypocrite and embarrassment as Michael Steele, I would have said that it was impossible. And then along came Debby...

On “Meet the Press,” the Democratic National Committee Chair. Rep. Debby Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.), reacted indignantly to the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke incident, saying in part,

“…And the bottom line is that the leading candidate on the Republican side for president couldn’t even bring himself to call Rush Limbaugh’s comments outrageous and call him out and ask him to apologize… Rush Limbaugh, in that apology, said that he was trying to be humorous. I don’t know any woman in America, David, that thinks that being called a slut is funny.”

By Wasserman-Schultz’s own conduct, however, we may apparently conclude that she thinks it is funny when a woman is called a “dumb twat” and a “cunt,” both of which vulgarities were directed at Republican women by HBO’s Bill Maher. Continue reading →

Rush’s Misogyny: No Defense

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

This is one of Rush's ugly pictures. He's earned it.

Any idiot, except Rush Limbaugh, apparently, could identify Rush’s outrageous, uncivil, mean-spirited, and ignorant (does he really think a woman has to take more birth control pills the more she has sex?) rant against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke (who testified before Congressional Democrats to advocate insurance coverage of contraceptives) as indefensible. That is why I wasn’t going to insult anyone’s intelligence by stating the obvious by posting to that effect. But a commenter here reminded me of the Ethics Alarms post about Bill Maher’s misogyny when he called Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” on his HBO show, and I decided that it should be made clear that as despicable as Maher’s statement was, Rush’s was worse. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Offensive Team Name

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The London, Ontario independent baseball team has decided to rename itself “The London Rippers.”

Jack's last victim: a logo, perhaps?

The city’s mayor has expressed concerns about the name, and good for him. This isn’t a manufactured political correctness complaint, based on the dubious logic that it demeans a group to honor it with an athletic team name. This is the opposite: a team name that honors a serial killer who disemboweled poor women in the slums of London in 1888. Misogyny isn’t cute or funny, and anyone who thinks that making Jack the Ripper a team symbol is anything but one more outrage perpetrated against his pathetic victims but gets indignant over the Atlanta Braves has his head on upside-down and backwards.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that an association of serial killers will protest that the name “London Rippers” dehumanizes them and puts them in the same category with lions, tigers and bears. In such an eventuality, I would side with the associations of lions, tigers and bears protesting that the name denigrates them. Sportswriting lawyer Craig Calcaterra, a sharp baseball mind whose NBC column alerted me to this story, somehow misses the point by a mile, writing:

“…Jack the Ripper did his work, like, 130 years ago. Murder is murder and it’s always awful, but at what point has enough time passed to where this kind of thing isn’t a problem?  And yes, I note the mayor’s nod to ending violence against women, but does a reference to a 19th century British serial killer who is more often fictionalized today than dealt with in his brutal reality really undermine those laudable aims?
I’m not saying it’s 100% fabulous. But really, kids were singing about Lizzie Borden taking an axe and giving her mother 40 whacks within a few years of that going down. Is it really too soon to be able to use a  long-dead historical figure as a mascot? There are a bunch teams called “crusaders” and the crusades were brutal. We still have Chief Wahoo around, and you can make an argument that the thinking behind that mascot (i.e. Indians are somehow less-than-human) represented way more death and destruction than anything Jack the Ripper did.”

Ugh. How many rationalizations are in this passage? Playground chants about Lizzie Borden (or the Black Plague, which is what “Ring around the rosey” is about) are not remotely comparable to naming a community’s baseball team after a serial killer. Playground refrains don’t become part of a community’s identity, and they don’t in any way bestow prestige on the dark subjects of their rhymes. Teams named after crusaders, warriors, braves and pirates don’t aspire to honor the deaths caused by these groups, any more than teams are named the Lions or Tigers because they have mauled people, or the Cardinals and Orioles are so named because the birds poop on our heads. There one reason, and only one, Jack the Ripper is famous. He slit the throats of desperate prostitutes and dissected them,: in the case of Mary Kelly, he minced his victim, leaving her internal organs on her night table. The London Ripper sent body parts of one victim to police, and taunted them. He didn’t possess a single admirable quality to justify a connection to a sports team, unless there are professional misogyny, mayhem or maniac leagues somewhere.

And Craig’s argument that is an expiration date on the offensiveness of trivializing tragedy is the worst of all. Seriously, Craig? So Penn State can call its wrestling team “the Molesters” in 100 years or so? What he’s really endorsing is ignorance. Kids who chant about the bubonic plague don’t realize it, and neither do their parents. That a lot of people don’t know the truth behind all the fictional Jack the Ripper tales is an argument for enlightening them, not pretending that killing prostitutes is just fun and games.

The mayor of London is right, Craig  is wrong, and if there ever was an inappropriate and harmful  team name, the London Rippers is it.

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Website—and Readers— of the Month: The Spearhead”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Bill Price, who operates the website I criticized in the post “Unethical Website—and Readers— of the Month: The Spearhead,” offers this response in the Comment of the Day. Among other things, he mentions some new revelations about Victoria Liss (whose story I wrote about here) , the Seattle bartender whose inept and excessive web-shaming brought infamy and abuse down on the head of the wrong man. It seems that she has wrongly accused men before. It’s not exactly a surprise. Bill post raises many issues, and I’ll have some responses at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day:

“Hi Jack, noticed the post, and have to say I’m a little disappointed.

“Your article on Amanpour was indeed quite good, and much appreciated. But I’d like to point out that The Spearhead is very lightly moderated, and therefore many of the comments are indeed very radical. Additionally, those who comment and rate the comments are the most radical of all — less than 5% of readers are regular commenters. This always happens on any politically oriented board with a large readership, so it should be no surprise. Continue reading →

Unethical Website—and Readers— of the Month: The Spearhead

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ironically, the site's typical reader is better described as "The Cement Head"

I don’t want to seem ungrateful: it is usually a welcome discovery when I find a popular website sending readers to Ethics Alarms, as has been the case the last two days with a site called The Spearhead. Nor do I have any ethical objections to The Spearhead’s theoretical mission, which is to stand against “misandry,” the mistreatment, cultural denigration of and discrimination against men. The phenomenon The Spearhead and its various bloggers rail against certainly exists in the U.S., as Ethics Alarms most forcefully pointed out after ABC’s Christiane Amanpour led a male-bashing roundtable on her Sunday show and did so as if she was having her guests name the state Capitals.

Unfortunately, the tone of most of the articles on The Spearhead is decidedly paranoid, misogynist or worse, echoing the dialogue in old movies and TV comedies in which rejected (and often repulsive) men would band together in a “Woman-Hater’s Club.” Its article (“Waitress Reacts to Insult With Online Lynch Mob”) that linked to Ethics Alarms, for example, weighing in on the Victoria Liss affair in which an aggrieved waitress used Facebook to invite Internet Avengers to heap abuse on a cheap and insulting customer but carelessly fingered the wrong man, took this from the episode:

“How many men would be so petty, so vindictive, and so morally depraved that they would launch a personal vendetta over a minor slight suffered in the course of a day’s work? Very few, obviously — such men would be instantly fired, and likely castigated by the courts (if not jailed) for harassment.”

Thus Victoria, in the view of the author, isn’t merely one inept Facebook user and an unusually vindictive waitress, but a typical representative of her gender and proof of the fairer sex’s inadequacies when compared to men. This is bigotry.  But the real ugliness arrived in the comments to the article, most of which heaped abuse on Liss and hatred on women generally, condemning the waitress not only for what she did, but for her appearance. Thanks to the site’s like/dislike feature, it was  possible to gauge which of the comments were representative of the majority. The verdict does not speak well for The Spearhead. Here is a representative sample:

  • “In today’s America, it is assured one will get undeserved shit, for speaking Truth.The customer spoke truth about her fatness, and now, the fat one is the one indignant…with a crowd of supporters defending her uncontrolled behavior. America = truth avoidance”

This endorsement of gratuitous rudeness and cruelty was approved of by the readership by a margin of 56 to 9. Continue reading →

Tardy and Biased Ethics Half-Hero: National Organization for Women (NOW)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Well, better late, confused, ineffective, biased and hypocritica than never, I guess.

Well, what do you know! The National Organization for Women, after sitting back and tolerating (or perhaps enjoying) comedian Bill Maher’s repeated use of misogynistic language to denigrate women as long as the women—Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin—were anti-abortion and conservatives, finally spoke up and followed their mission when Maher’s show, as it was bound to do, went too far even for NOW.

NOW issued a release condemning Maher and his guests on HBO’s “Real Time” for endorsing rape and sexual abuse, or “angry fucking,” as proper punishment for Bachmann for the crime of not seeing the world as Maher and guests Dan Savage and Marc Maron do. While discussing Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus’s controversial gay Christian therapy clinic, the panel and Maher discussed “Mr. Bachmann’s” sexuality and marriage with Michele.  Marc Maron declared that he hoped Marcus “takes all that rage that comes from repression and denial and brings it into the bedroom. . . I hope he fucks her angrily, because that’s how I would, and I’ve thought about it.” Continue reading →